On 23 July 1596 Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, at the age of seventy, died at Somerset House. His successor as Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cobham, was much less sympathetic to the theatrical profession; one of his ancestors, Sir John Oldcastle, had been mocked in the first part of King Henry IV. So relations between the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were not necessarily benevolent. The players may even have feared that Cobham would support the Lord Mayor’s request permanently to close down the public playhouses. As Thomas Nashe put it in a letter of this time: “howeuer in there old Lords tyme they thought there state settled, it is now so uncertayne they cannot build upon it.”1 The players had begun a tour of Kent soon after Hunsdon’s death — they were playing at the market hall of Faversham on 1 August — but once more they found themselves in an insecure profession.
A few days after playing in Faversham, however, Shakespeare suffered a greater blow. His son of eleven years, Hamnet Shakespeare, died. There is every reason to suppose that Shakespeare hastened from Kent to Stratford, for the funeral on 11 August. The death of a young son can have many and various effects. Did Shakespeare feel any sense of guilt, or responsibility, at having left his family in Stratford? And how did he respond to his grieving wife, who had been obliged to care for the children without his presence? The questions cannot be answered, of course. There are some powerful lines in the second part of Henry IV, written shortly after these events, when Northumberland’s wife blames his absence for the death of their son (985-6). The child
Threw many a Northward looke, to see his father
Bring vp his powers, but he did long in vaine.
Many of Shakespeare’s later plays have the pervasive theme of families reunited and love restored. In The Winter’s Tale the son, Mamillius, dies as the result of his father’s conduct; the boy who plays this part doubled as Perdita, the daughter who at the end of the play is restored to her errant father. In her form and figure the dead son is also revived.
The death of children was much more common in the sixteenth than in the twenty-first century. Elizabethan families were also more “extended,” with various cousins and other kin, so that sudden death had a natural buttress against prolonged or severe grief. It is not necessary to fall into the delusion that sixteenth-century parents were less caring or less emotional than their successors, but it is important to note that the death of a child was not an unusual experience. The cause of the death of Shakespeare’s son is not known, although at the end of this year Stratford suffered a severe rise in mortality from typhus and dysentery. Hamnet’s twin sister Judith, however, lived to the great age of seventy.
So Shakespeare had lost his only son, the recipient of his inheritance. In the sixteenth century the blood line was charged with significance, and in his subsequent will he went to elaborate lengths to provide for an ultimate male heir, suggesting that the matter still provoked his attention and concern. He had lost the image of himself.
It is of course impossible to gauge the effect upon the dramatist. He may, or may not, have become inconsolable. He may have sought refuge, as so many others have done, in hard and relentless work. The plays of this period have nevertheless been interpreted in the light of this dead son. One critic has described Romeo and Juliet as a “dirge for the son’s death”;2 this stretches chronology, if not credulity. In James Joyce’s Ulysses Stephen Dedalus declares that his “boyson’s death is the death-scene of young Arthur in King John. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare.” Indeed it cannot be wholly coincidental that Shakespeare was drawn at a later date to the tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, who is haunted by the spectre of his dead father. In Twelfth Night, the story of identical twins — boy and girl — is resolved by the miraculous reappearance of the male child from apparent death. The twin is restored to life. In the period immediately following Hamnet’s death, as Stephen Dedalus noted, Shakespeare also rewrote the play concerning King John. One of his additions is a lament by Constance on the untimely death of her young son, which begins (1398–1405):
Greefe fils the roome vp of my absent childe:
Lies in his bed, walkes vp and downe with me,
Puts on his pretty lookes, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffes out his vacant garments with his forme;
Then, haue I reason to be fond of griefe?
Fareyouwelclass="underline" had you such a losse as I,
I could giue better comfort then you doe.
It may not be appropriate to draw strong lines between the art and the life but, in such a case as this, it defies common sense to pretend that Constance’s lament has nothing whatever to do with Shakespeare’s loss of Hamnet.
The comicall History of the Merchant of Venice, or otherwise called the Iewe of Venyce, written in this same period for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, begins in mournful tone. It is one of the strangest, and most arresting, openings in Shakespeare:
In sooth I know not why I am so sad,
It wearies me, you say it wearies you..
It is often assumed that Shakespeare himself played this part of Antonio, implicitly enamoured of his friend Bassanio. Antonio appears at crucial moments of action, but he is generally a lower-keyed figure who in rehearsals could have guided the others. The play does not linger on his sentimental tragedy, however, but mounts higher with the story of Shylock and his bloody bargain.
It was Shakespeare’s practice to combine elements from what would seem irreconcilable sources, and thereby create new forms of harmony. For The Merchant of Venice he no doubt plundered an old stage drama, The Jew, which had been played at the Bull Theatre almost twenty years before; a spectator there described it as representing “the greedinesse of worldly chusers and bloody mindes of Usurers.”3 That itself is a reasonable if brief summary of Shakespeare’s play. It would have been just like Shakespeare’s ordinary practice — to take an ancient “potboiler,” which he must have seen and remembered, and to infuse it with fresh life. He had also witnessed The Jew of Malta, since the role of Shylock is in part based upon that of Marlowe’s Barabas; the instinct for imitation is implicated in the desire to out-write his dead rival. The story of Shylock acted as the catalyst, whereby these two plays came together in new and unusual combination. He also makes use of an Italian story from Ser Giovanni’s Il Pecorone; it had not been translated into English at this time, and so we are led to the conjecture either that Shakespeare could read Italian or that he picked up the story at second hand. He remembered, too, the story of the Argonauts from his schoolboy reading of Ovid. There are of course other sources, many of them now unknown or forgotten, part of the texture of Shakespeare’s mind; but with the plays, the Italian story and the school reading of set texts, we may gain some inkling of the combinatory power of Shakespeare’s imagination.
The character of Shylock has provoked so many different interpretations that he has turned into the Wandering Jew, progressing through a thousand theses and critical studies. He may have been the model for Dickens’s Fagin but, unlike the entrepreneur of Saffron Hill, he could never become a caricature; he is too filled with life and spirit, too linguistically resourceful, to be conventionalised. He is altogether too powerful and perplexing a figure. It is almost as if Shakespeare fully intended to create a character drawing upon conventional prejudices about an alien race, but found that he was unable to sympathise with such a figure. He simply could not write a stereotype. He would later explore the nobility of an alien or “outsider” in Othello. It is likely that the sound and appearance of Shylock led Shakespeare forward, without the dramatist really knowing in which direction he was going. That is why he is perhaps, like so many of Shakespeare’s principal figures, beyond interpretation. He is beyond good and evil. He is simply a magnificent and extravagant stage representation.